Within the art, personal communication service (PCS) is provided in paging zones. The PCS switching system identifies each registered wireless set as being in a particular paging zone. When the PCS system receives an incoming call for a particular wireless set, the PCS system requests that all base stations within the paging zone of the wireless set transmit messages (paging messages) requesting that the wireless set identify itself to one of the base stations. A paging zone is normally related to a physical space. In addition, a paging zone can have a number of wireless base stations so as to provide high call capacity within a given paging zone. In general, each PCS base station can handle a small number of wireless sets that are actively engaged in a telephone call. This number varies from two to twelve active wireless sets at any given time. In the prior art, when an incoming call is received for a wireless set by the PCS switching system, the latter system requests that all base stations within the paging zone send a paging message to the destination wireless set. In PCS switching systems, there can be hundreds of wireless base stations within a paging zone. This results in very expensive algorithms and expenditure of a large amount of real time to accomplish transmitting messages to all of the base stations within the paging zone. The base stations transmit the paging message over what is often referred to as a paging channel which is shared by all of the base stations.
The user of PCS switching systems want a large number of base stations in each zone so that they will have high call capacity within a given physical area. Similarly, since each time a wireless set enters a new paging zone it must reregister, the vendors of PCS switching systems want paging zones large physical areas so as to reduce the number of registrations that must be performed by the PCS switching system. Each registration requires processing time by the PCS switching system.